Written by FACT Team on Tuesday, July 16 2013

Black metal’s most infamous figure has been arrested in France, accused of plotting a massacre.

Musically, Varg Vikernes is best known for his work as one-man black metal machine Burzum, releasing some of the genre’s best albums in the early to mid ’90s. A good part of his legend, however, is due to his run-ins with the law: after spending a good part of the early 1990s burning Christian churches, 1994 saw him jailed for the murder of Mayhem’s Øystein Aarseth, better known as Euronymous. In 2003, Vikernes went on the run but was eventually caught, and in 2009 he was released from jail.

Vikernes recorded two albums while in jail, 1997’s Dauði Baldrsand 1999’s Hliðskjálf, and they might not be his last prison diaries: as the Quietus point out, several French sources report that he’s been arrested at his farm near the town of Salon-la-Tour. French police suspect him of preparing a “massacre”, and are currently in the process of searching his farm for weapons.

The motives for a potential Vikernes massacre seem unclear at this point – bar, you know, the fact that he’s Burzum – but the French sources reporting this have pointed out Vikernes’ 2011 open letter to Anders Breivik, the Oslo resident who went on a rampage in 2011, killing 77 people.